It’s always a bit odd to read arguments you don’t agree with and wonder how the author and other readers can find it not just coherent but persuasive where you see mental chaos. But even so we were particularly puzzled to hear from Scientific American that “Researchers have found an environmentally safer way to extract the lithium 6 needed to create fuel for nuclear fusion reactors. The new approach doesn’t require toxic mercury, as conventional methods do”. No. But since there aren’t nuclear fusion reactors you might as well be telling us about some new and cleaner way to make dilithium for the warp drives.
It’s not that we doubt the cleverness of the process, the undesirability of mercury in many contexts or the requirement of lithium 6 for fusion reactors. OK, it is the last one to some degree, because of our big problem here: there are no nuclear fusion reactors. Which means that while lithium 6 might be a plausible guess, nobody actually knows what fuel they might use if there were.
Scientific American half-admits it:
“All the nuclear power plants in operation right now use nuclear fission – the process of splitting apart an atom – to produce energy. But scientists have spent decades and entire careers in a frustrating quest to achieve nuclear fusion, which combines atoms, because it releases far more energy and produces no dangerous waste. Many hope fusion could one day be a significant source of carbon-free power.”
Yes. And many hope one day to win the lottery. But right now the odds of purchasing a winning ticket are quite slim, though better it seems than the odds of making fusion work as a practical energy source. And apparently the manifold obstacles include this one:
“In addition to the many technical issues that have kept nuclear fusion perpetually in development, the process also needs fuel that presents its own problems. The fuel requires a rare lithium isotope (a version of an atom of the element with a different number of neutrons) called lithium 6.”
Which as noted we don’t even know is the right kind of dilithium to achieve warp speed or whatever they’re fantasizing about here.
The degree of fantasy is extraordinary… or maybe not given how much of the whole green energy transition was placed on foundations firmly anchored in the clouds. Thus Canary Media recently hyped:
“A fusion firm that’s already making money – but not from selling power/ Wisconsin’s Shine Technologies is ‘practicing fusion’ with imaging and medical products before moving on to (hopefully) producing grid electricity.”
Yeah. And we’re still working for a living before moving on to winning $100 million by picking the right numbers. Or hitching a lift on a Vogon ship to explore new worlds where they have 23rd-century technology.
Current fusion tech assumes we can overcome the problems associated with containing a plasma hotter than the sun a few inches away from superconducting magnets operating at close to absolute zero….continuously…..while producing gigawatts of heat to generate electricity, while consuming gigawatts of electricity to refrigerate the superconducting magnets. This can only be described as technically infeasible…way past “difficult”. The technical challenges associated with preventing the heat transfer that quenches the plasma, which is dictated by the Stephan-Boltzmann law, with the best technology we can invent …compared to what might be necessary….is like asking people who battle their enemies with catapults to invent something to get to the Moon and back on a regular weekly tourist schedule….
It’s great for Ph.D. types who feel a need to schmooze politicians with stories of their technical prowess and the need of just a few bucks more to succeed…so that they can justify further paycheques…..but sooner or later one has to quit relying on raindancers in the hopes of saving the crops…and especially quit sending them huge gobs of cash to pay for the biggest rain dance they can can imagine..
It is much easier to solve problems that don't exist like the nuclear fusion fuel problem than it is to solve problems that do exist like the US national debt!
Nuclear fusion is a relativistic power source. For any observer at any point in time, fusion is always 25 years in the future.
That first line of thus article is exactly how I feel about most news reports nowadays…
@doug, there are other methods than the tocamac, some may be more feasible than others. Physics often explores dead ends for long periods of time before someone comes up with a better solution. The current situation in the world is that the amount of money spent on these endeavours is completely insignificant compared to other follies such as the climate idiocy and warmongering.
We all know that antigravity technology is the key to the future of everything from energy production to transportation. Rather than spending money on nuclear fusion we should be trying to make contact with extraterrestrials who understand how to build a land speeder.